Going Dutch_ How England Plundered Holland's Glory - Lisa Jardine [141]
In the second lecture, Hooke went on to analyse Huygens’s Discours sur la cause de la pesanteur (Discourse concerning the cause of weight). Here Hooke fastens onto Huygens’s treatment of gravity:
For what follows afterwards is additionall to that Discourse as he himself Declares in his preface, which is concerning those proprietys of Gravity which I myself first Discovered and shewed to this Society many years since, which of late Mr. Newton has done me the favour to print and Publish as his own Inventions. And Particularly that of the Ovall figure of the earth was read by me to this Society about 27 years since upon the occasion of the Carrying the Pendulum Clocks to Sea And at two other times since, though I have had the Ill fortune not to be heard, and I conceive there are some present that may never well Remember and Doe [not] know that Mr. Newton did not send up that addition to his book till some weeks after I had read & shewn the experiments & Demonstration thereof in this place.76
As usual, Hooke insists that he had himself long ago made every one of the discoveries Huygens and Newton claim for themselves. This time he had clear justification for maintaining his influence, and documented the indebtednesses with measured intelligence. A group of well-disposed members attended the lectures in question, including Sir Robert Southwell, Sir John Hoskins, Waller, Edmond Halley, John Wallis, Hans Sloane ‘and divers others’.77 But Huygens and Newton had moved on.78 According to the records, Hooke’s intervention was barely registered, and nobody bothered to respond.79
The mercurial Dutch virtuoso Christiaan Huygens floats in and out of other people’s stories from his adolescence, through the Europe-wide acclaim accorded him in his prime (while he resided in Paris, as Louis XIV’s favourite scientist), down to his decline, depression and death. From his childhood he had been his influential and ambitious father’s favourite. Sir Constantijn was determined to find his second son a lucrative appointment to enable him to utilise his scientific talents, and as an anglophile his first preference would have been for Christiaan to join the scientific community in London. Between October 1661 and April 1665, Sir Constantijn shuttled between Paris and London as he negotiated the return of Orange (seized by Louis XIV) to the house of Orange. While he was at it, he lobbied people in high places to try to secure a position for his son.80
Christiaan preferred Paris. Even the festivities surrounding Charles II’s coronation did not make London seem glamorous to him. After his first visit, he wrote to his brother Lodewijk:
I had little pleasure of my visit to London … The stink of the smoke is unbearable and most unhealthy, the city poorly built, with narrow streets having no proper paving and nothing but hovels … There is little going on and nothing compared with what you see in Paris.81
In December 1666, Christiaan Huygens was appointed to a salaried position in the new Académie royale des sciences in Paris, though he was made a foreign Fellow of the Royal Society, and remained in active contact with his fellow scientists in London throughout his life.
If it is hard to imagine a biography of Christiaan’s father Sir Constantijn which does not straddle the Narrow Sea and consider him in a robustly Anglo–Dutch historical context, the same is even more true of Christiaan, whose life and